Fareed Zakaria Lists Biggest Mistakes Dems Made — And #3’s a Doozy

Fareed Zakaria … red pilled? Perhaps not, but he might come closest on his cable channel to grasping the lessons of the election. 

On yesterday’s GPS on CNN, Zakaria offered three big reasons why Democrats lost this election. You may be saying at the moment, Well, there’s Kamala Harris, and there’s Joe Biden … what’s the third? Zakaria actually hits the nail on the head in terms of the party’s disconnect from the electorate:

Zakaria actually offers these in ascending order of importance. First up is immigration, and the way that Democrats attempted to play the racism card over legitimate concerns about border security. That backfired in a big way:

The first big error was the Biden administration’s blindness to the collapse of the immigration system and the chaos at the border. An asylum system that was meant for a small number of persecuted individuals was being used by millions to gain legal entry. Instead of shutting it down, liberals branded anyone protesting as heartless and racist.

They missed a massive shift in American public opinion in just a few years. In 2020, the percentage of Americans who wanted to decrease immigration was just 28 percent. By this year, it was 55 percent.

When Kamala Harris went on “The View” and was asked how she would have differed from Biden, instead of basically saying nothing different, she should have said, I would have shut down the border early and hard.

Harris tried to argue two things: that Trump was to blame for the Biden border crisis because of his opposition to a bill that would have allowed 1.25 million asylum entries a year. Harris also claimed that she would secure the border without ever explaining what she would do differently from Joe Biden. Literally no one believes that Trump created this crisis; even House Democrats in border states tried to get Biden to act. Biden himself tacitly admitted culpability by restoring Trump’s asylum policies in the spring when it became very clear just how much of a liability the border crisis had become. Harris claimed she’d extend those policies, but why would voters take a copy when they could choose the original instead?

Next up, Zakaria scolds Democrats for their use of lawfare as a form of politics. Not only did this not prevent Trump from winning a second term, it might have made him more popular than ever. It certainly went a long way toward proving Trump’s claims about the “deep state,” Zakaria says:

The second error was an overzealous misuse of law to punish Trump. The most egregious of the cases pursued was Alvin Braggs one in New York, one that even he was once skeptical of, but was reportedly pressured by some on the left into pursuing. Some cases like the Georgia one were legitimate. But the host of them piled on in rapid succession, gave the impression that the legal system was being weaponized to get Trump. It confirmed to his base what it had always believed. That over-educated urban liberals were hypocrites, happy to bend rules and norms when it suited their purposes. It’s worth noting that in this week’s election, a CNN exit poll found that among those who believe that democracy in the U.S. is threatened, a majority supported Trump. Lawfare turned Trump from being a loser into a victor. And as his indictments grew, his campaign contributions surged and his poll numbers solidified.

This one’s so obvious that the Biden administration is trying to roll it back toute suite. Special counsel Jack Smith has gone to federal court to suspend all pending actions in his prosecutions. Whether the state of New York does the same thing is another matter, but the lesson is clear enough for even Kathy Hochul to suss out. Four years ago, Trump lost NY 61/38; last week, Kamala Harris only won it by twelve points, 56/44. This lesson is clear as day. 

However, Zakaria really nails it with his third reason, and lands on the point I have made since Election Day. Yes, Harris was an unprecedented disaster as a candidate, but why? It’s because that all of her claims of “I grew up in a middle-class household” rang hollow, because she doesn’t speak the language. Neither does the Democrat Party any longer, Zakaria argues; they speak a weird dialect of English we can call Academiage — with the final consonant pronounced aaaazh, of course. Academiage is a dialect of elites and radicals that condescends to their target audience, especially when it comes to reordering biological reality to suit their fantasies:

The final error is a more diffuse one. The dominance of identity politics on the left, which made it push for all kinds of DEI policies that largely came out of the urban academic bubble, but alienated many mainstream voters. There’s an irony in claiming to be pro-Latino by insisting that people use the term Latinx, only discovering that Latinos themselves think the word is weird.

This kind of obsession made Democrats view people too much through their ethnic or racial or gender identity and it made them miss, for example, that working class Latinos were moving toward Trump perhaps because they were socially conservative or liked his macho rhetoric, or even agreed with his hardline stance on immigration. …

The problem is much deeper than simply one about nouns and pronouns. The entire focus on identity has morphed into something deeply illiberal. Judging people by the color of their skin, rather than the content of their character.

Immigration and inflation drove the policy side of the election, but this drove the cultural decision by middle America. The Left has tried to reinstall segregation in nearly every facet of American life, driven by two impulses: revenge, and the power to redistribute social goods. That’s the entire point of Critical Race Theory and DEI — to force more power into the hands of government for redistributive efforts. Their vision would have created massive social disorder — and already has to a significant degree — by making immutable characteristics the sine qua non of discernment. It’s a recipe for tribalism, and thankfully Americans just roundly rejected it.

The question will be whether Democrats learn these lessons. In fact, the other major question will be whether CNN and other Protection Racket Media outlets learn them, too. Thus far, there aren’t too many promising signs, but Zakaria’s lengthy lecture holds out some hope that sanity might return. 

Addendum: Yeah, it’s a clickbait headline. Sue me.